LÖVE game programming course for kids/teens in Kansas City (August 2012)

There will be a Lua game programming class for kids and teens in Kansas City by indie game developer Rachel Morris some time in August 2012.

LÖVE 2D game engine and Tiled Map Editor will be used. Both are open source and run perfectly fine on Linux systems.

Rachel is known for OpenArt and you can check out an interview with her or her GitHub repositories.

video: Beginning Programming guide - Need newbies

Feedback on the existing course materials and of course participants are requested.

GunFu Deadlands 1.01: Performance Up!

GunFu Deadlands title screen

GunFu Deadlands, a quick, atmospheric retro keys+mouse top-down shooter for Win/Osx/Lin has been updated (1.01) to run with LÖVE 0.7.2 and the development codebase moved from Subversion to Git.

The game plays perfectly fine on a ASUS EeePC 1000H netbook running Arch Linux 32bit. A previous version (don't remember which) was extremely slowly. I can't tell whether the playable speed is thanks to improvements of GFD, love2d or perhaps the drivers for my netbook but if you've had performance trouble with the game in the past, try again!

Note: if you get shot in the title screen and start the game before respawning, you will be able to walk through walls.

This is the first update of GunFu Deadlands since the 1.0 release 22 months ago.

Video: GunFu Deadlands 1.01 gameplay

By the way, did you know that GunFu Deadlands is one of the 250 Indie Games You Must Play?

PS: I got word from the developer about the performance increase:

Just for your interest, I made some measurements and it seems that the speed increase is indeed dramatic: 55% faster.

I computed the mean FPS rate by measuring the time it takes to render 1000 frames in-game and dividing 1000 by this number. The formula (FPS_faster_version - FPS_slower_version) / FPS_slower_version is what produced this 55%.

Simple & Polished

 Avoision

 Falling Block Game 2

Avoision is a simple collect-dots-avoid-blocks game.

Falling Block Game 2 is a Tetris clone.

Both are simple games. Both are very polished! I avoided them at first, assuming they would be of the yet-another-hello-world-game type but luckily got over that arrogant moment. :)

Neither forces full-screen, they scale to any resolution, controls are crystal clear and feedback is great.

Both games use Radius Engine, which is a Win/Lin OpenGL/SDL/Lua engine. Kind of like LÖVE.

For Arch Linux users: I made AUR packages for Radius Engine, Avoision and FBG2. I use clyde for managing packages.

PS: Sometimes polish is worth more than complexity. Can you name free open source games that are polished to the max?

Quoting releases: Bitfighter, Love2d, OpenClonk

Bitfighter

There's a new version of the retro-style multiplayer top-down action game Bitfighter and a well-readable changelog:

This version features new Soccer rules, and a verified user name system protected by your forums password. Many other improvements, including important stability fixes and enhancements for all platforms.

love2d 0.7 no-game-screen

LÖVE 0.7 "Game Slave" has finally been released! This is a Lua 2D game engine also known as "love2d". Oh, and it's on Indie DB. Oh, and Indie DB allows to sort engines by license!

Framebuffers, for rendering to places other than the screen. Threads, for true multithreaded programming. New callbacks, like love.quit and love.focus. A text-origin change from lower- to upper-left. And about a million different bugs have been squashed!

You'll find games and toys and demos to try out in this forum and you can give my stupid little game a try too.

"The Guardians of Windmills" OpenClonk scenario

OpenClonk 1.0 hass been released and I just noticed that I love how their main page contains all the info important to people who don't know the project.

This milestone focuses on some fast paced melees, races and a few experimental scenarios to choose from. All scenarios are meant to be played multiplayer through the internet. It features completely new controls, a new HUD and many weapons and tools to choose from. Also included are four tutorials that guide new players and veteran clonkers through the new controls.

I feel like giving OpenClonk a try soon and hope the tutorials are any good. Here's a game description, if you never took a closer look at the project like me.

OpenClonk is a free multiplayer action game where you control clonks, small but witty and nimble humanoid beings. The game is mainly about mining, settling and fast-paced melees. OpenClonk is also not just a game but also a versatile 2D game engine that offers countless possibilites to make your own mods.